


bringin' home the rain

by Nokomis



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, References to Canonical Character Death, STAY Server Exchange, Slight AU shifting Jason's timeline where he wasn't found by Talia, Stephanie Brown is Robin, and trauma associated with the aftermath of that, but it also lines up with Steph's time as Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26164897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: After Jason digs his way out of his grave, he lives a broken existence in the city unable (and unwilling) to remember his lifebefore. That changes one night when he sees Robin flying overhead and follows her home.
Relationships: Stephanie Brown & Jason Todd
Comments: 17
Kudos: 214





	bringin' home the rain

**Author's Note:**

> For dnky, for the STAY birthday server exchange for the prompt _Steph is the Robin flying on Gotham's rooftops when Jason digs his way out of his grave. He saw her one day and followed her home._
> 
> Thanks to Rainpuddle for the beta!

The world is: confusion. Dirt and blood under his ragged nails. Pain.

For a long time, that’s all that it is.

Eventually, eventually, the haze seems to dissipate. Thoughts rattle through his head -- how to get food. How to hide. How to stay warm.

It’s a narrow existence, carved out in the unnoticed spaces. 

He remembers -- he thinks he remembers things. Warm light, soft carpet, hot food. A flash of light and heat, pain. A dark shadow that feels like _love and home and protection._ Flying.

Nothing real.

*

He’s in the Narrows, huddled into his hoodie -- it’s thick and worn, a little stained, and the kind lady who sometimes gives him hot dogs from her stand had slipped it to him. “Someone left it on a bench,” she’d explained, but there had still been a tag from the thrift store inside it.

He spends more time near her cart, after. Glaring at anyone who eyes her cash box too long. Feeling a familiar thrum through his muscles when he does, like he knows what to do, like he can win any fight.

He’s been in enough fights by now that he knows to trust his body, that his muscles have memories that he simply _doesn’t._

He thinks something terrible happened to him, once. There are sometimes dreams that fill him with a deep sense of dread, that make him think that if he _does_ remember, this fragile existence he’s living will crumble into dust. That he’ll become something else.

So he keeps to his small world-- the condemned apartment that he sleeps in, its walls oddly familiar. The streets that he wanders, the money he sometimes earns through simple labor. Stacking boxes, moving furniture, lugging junk. 

Keeping an eye on people like the kind woman at the hot dog stand, or the hunched-over elderly man at the pawn shop, or the doe-eyed girl with the baby on her hip who sometimes uses her food stamps to buy him dry goods.

Things are stable. Not good, not bad. He has a routine, he eats somewhat regularly, he only wakes up screaming a few times a night.

Then it happens.

He’s leaning against a building, listening to the chatter around him. Words make more sense to him these days-- a few months before, he’d struggled to parse out their meaning. He doesn’t use them much himself -- the times he’s tried, the words croak out of his throat, reminding him of a metal door that has rusted shut being forced open. He thinks maybe if he tried more that they’d come with more ease, but there isn’t much to be said that can’t be accomplished with a nod or a shake of the head.

He happens to look up -- the sun has just set, and there is a flutter of movement. He blinks, uncertain -- feels a ghost of a memory, like something was fluttering from his shoulders, like the muscles in his arms were burning and his legs swinging with wild abandon -- and sees a flash of color. Red and green and yellow.

He points up, involuntarily, and the hot dog lady smiles. “I saw it, too! You a fan of Robin?”

Robin. The word echoes strangely through his mind, settling comfortably within him. Robin means-- justice. Magic. Pain. Laughter.

White-hot heat, then nothingness.

His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why.

“First time seeing Robin?” the lady continues, as though he isn’t falling apart inside.

He shakes his head, even though he has no memory of it before. It’s something-- it’s something from _before_ , from that great nothingness that fills his mind. 

“It’s something special, alright,” the lady says. She reaches out and pats his arm, it makes him jolt involuntarily, like a startled deer. “Gotham sure is lucky to have Batman and Robin, no matter what those bastards say about it.”

She doesn’t clarify which bastards, and he doesn’t ask. He’s heard talk, men who reek of beer and sweat who talk endlessly about what they’d do to the Bat if they came across him. It’s desperate and always made him feel a little sad, though he could never quite place why.

And now-- when he blinks, he can see the afterimage of a figure silhouetted against the night sky, of blazing bright colors against the dull lights from the buildings. 

Robin haunts his dreams.

He wakes five, ten, a dozen times a night after that, with a name on his lips that he can never quite remember when he’s fully awake. He seems to notice every conversation that mentions Gotham’s vigilantes as he walks the street-- Batman, Batgirl, Nightwing.

Robin.

Once he hears someone calling out the word, a desperate cry of Robin that echoes down the street, and he stops, turns, begins to run towards it.

He doesn’t know why.

It turns out to be a teen, crying out to a younger sibling. The errant Robin is found quickly. His eyes veer unerringly towards the shadows, and he points wordlessly to the form he can make out there. 

The teen laughs, says, “Thanks so much, man,” with true gratitude, and it causes something to simmer in his belly. Something-- good, he thinks, though there’s little of that in his life. Pride. 

He likes to help. 

He does it more and more, until people know to come to him. He still keeps an eye to the sky, and once even asks about Robin, his voice underused and raw.

“My cousin saw Robin yesterday in Crime Alley,” one kid tells him. 

It’s not much to go on, but come nightfall every night he goes to Crime Alley and watches the sky. Then he sees Robin.

Red and yellow and green overhead, and there’s something -- there’s something not right about what he’s seeing. When he closes his eyes there’s a strange afterimage, like he’s seeing Robin reflected in front of him, and Robin is dark haired. Male. 

The Robin overhead is neither of those things.

He follows her without thinking -- running through the streets and hidden alleys, climbing fire escapes, at one point getting on the train that she’s perched on top of. It’s difficult and tedious and eventually leads him to Robin’s house.

She lives in a rough neighborhood on the edge of the urban sprawl; the house is in dire need of repairs, but is still a far sight nicer than where he’s staying. She hauls herself over a rickety fence, swings herself from a branch on a large tree like a gymnast, launching herself higher into the branches with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times.

He can feel a ghost-twinge in his muscles watching her, and thinks -- _I can do that._

She steps lightly on the roof, Robin costume incongruous with the setting, and slides open a window, ducking inside in a smooth, well-practiced motion. Moments later the light inside switches on, and he can see her shadow briefly against the glass.

He shouldn’t get closer.

But if he stands here on the side of the street, hunched in his hoodie, he’ll eventually draw attention. The tree Robin climbed is safer. He follows her path exactly, knowing if anyone else is in the house, she would have chosen it to avoid notice.

Standing at the base of the tree, he gives in to his earlier hunch, and-- he _can_ do that, finds that swinging from the branch is easier than he would have thought, even without the gloves she’d worn. The branch is smooth in a way that’s not natural; hands have gripped it a hundred times.

The tree has several natural spots to sit; he perches on the sturdiest. There are enough branches that he shouldn’t be noticeable to Robin. Her light is still on, illuminating her room and allowing him to see inside easily. The room is empty, but he can see the Robin uniform tossed carelessly over a chair. There are several closed doors in the room, and the walls are covered in old wallpaper, cracks, and a variety of posters. There’s clutter everywhere and the bed is unmade, like she’s too busy to bother with it.

It’s warm and comfortable and undeniably a _home_. It makes something churn in his belly, something sharp and angry. She’s Robin, and she has a home, and she’s warm and comfortable after flying through the night, and it’s not fair, not when he--

The thought ends, abruptly, like it’s too much for him. Like it’s something he shouldn’t know, not yet.

He stares at the uniform. The way it’s draped over the chair makes him think obscurely of a corpse, of a lifeless shell. When he blinks, he can see red of the tunic, the R bloodied and the cloth torn, soot and—

She comes back into the room, he’s thankful. She’s tugging a brush through her blonde tangle of hair, wet from the shower she’s clearly just taken. She sprays something in her hair as she fights with it, cursing loudly and telling herself she should just chop it off already. 

She’s already changed and she’s in a purple hoodie and sweatpants that make her look softer than she had swinging through the night.

He feels— invasive, suddenly. Following Robin hadn’t felt wrong, hadn’t felt like an invasion of privacy before, but out of uniform she’s suddenly just a girl, and he shouldn’t be staring into her bedroom. 

He shifts, ready to find his footing and drop out of the tree, when she goes sharp and wary, in one startled movement Robin again. He doesn’t think he made a sound, but she’s undeniably staring directly at him. 

She lets out a sigh— not quite relief but exasperation, and walks towards the window, dropping her brush on her bed and saying as she opens the window, “Listen, Tim, I know you’re pissed, but that’s no reason to scare the living bejesus out of me.”

He is frozen. He should _go_ , he shouldn’t _be_ here, she can’t _see_ him…

“You’re not Tim,” she says, voice steady and fierce. “What are you doing here?”

His shoulders hunch. He can see the way down, very clearly -- grab that branch, drop a few feet, balance on that limb-- but Robin is right _there_ , staring directly at him, talking to him, and there’s something he wants to ask her, something he wants to _demand_ of her…

“Mine.” His voice is gravelly from underuse. 

“Eww, are you a stalker? Because I will absolutely kick your ass, get out of my tree.”

He shakes his head. “Robin is.” He tries to clear his throat, to make the words escape easier. “Mine. Me.”

Her eyes widen slightly, but she doesn’t budge. “No idea what you’re talking about, but still--” She holds up a hand, putting a finger down with each word to make a fist: “Ass, kicked, leave, now, creep.”

He points inside, where the Robin uniform is clearly visible. “That’s…” he trails off, unable to remember the rest of the thought. The things he’s saying, they feel like… they feel like there’s a well, deep within him, and each new phrase is a bucket of water being drawn from it. There’s so much more, there’s a whole lifetime, waiting patiently under the surface, just waiting on the bucket to release it into the world.

He moves a little, just enough that he’s facing her. Facing Robin, this impossible girl who’s taken on the mantle that had been his own. His hood gets caught on a branch, falls off his head, revealing his face to her. She doesn’t cringe, doesn’t show shock, but a vague sense of curiosity, as if his face were one she’d seen once and can’t quite recall where.

“Tell Bruce…” and it’s like there’s an inferno in his mind, raging green and overwhelming. He can’t finish he thought, just tries to flee. Takes his path out of the tree, and out of the corner of his eye sees her heading off the roof after him, holding the edge and dropping down gracefully, as the branches tear at him. 

He hits the ground running, but only makes it a few steps before he feels something grab his wrist. He jerks it away, spinning to face the threat.

It’s Robin, still maskless, still in her sweats. She’s in a loose fighting stance -- no particular style, but her feet and legs are positioned to deal with nearly any threat. “What did you say?”

He says the name, then. The name that sometimes echoes in his head, that sometimes feels desperately important. “Bruce.”

Robin goes pale. “Who _are_ you?”

He runs, and this time, she doesn’t catch him.

*

He doesn’t go back to the condemned apartment that night, certain that Robin has followed him.

He doesn’t see her, doesn’t sense anyone near him, but he stays out the whole night, ducking through crowds, evading his pursuer.

She can’t catch him. She can’t. It would be catastrophic.

It already _feels_ catastrophic. He hates whatever impulse led him to chasing Robin in the first place, to watching through her window, to _speaking_ to her.

The words he spoke are haunting him.

They had felt true on his lips, but they _can’t_ be. He wasn’t Robin, he has no claim on it. Robin is brightness and light and justice, and he’s... He’s broken, and simmering with feelings that are nothing akin to brightness or light. 

And the name---

He remembers crying out that name, in the early days, when his fingers were still raw and his body was filled with strange pains and aches that made every movement its own special hell. Remembers how desperate he was to see him, how he thought that this… that Bruce could _fix_ things, but being unable to figure out how to find him.

Then it faded, along with the worst of the pain, and as he’d eked out an existence in the forgotten corners of the city, he’d come to rely only on himself.

Now, the thought creeps into his mind that maybe he doesn’t have to.

He shakes that thought away, refusing to entertain it. He sleeps a few sparse moments -- on the train, shoulders hunched inward, head against the glass; tucked into a door frame; in a tree in Robinson Park. He returns to his usual haunts in the morning, doing a little work, checking in on the people he thinks of as _his_ to protect.

Robin never shows, Batman never shows, and in the cold grey sunlight it starts to feel more and more like he’d dreamt the whole encounter.

He intends to stay away from his abandoned apartment one more night, but it’s raining. The thought of spending the next day in wet shoes, each step squelching underfoot while blisters form on his feet is enough of a deterrent that he goes back to his spot, pulling off his wet hoodie and spreading it out carefully to dry.

He dresses in fresh clothes, eats some of his carefully hoarded food, and settles into his nest of blankets for the night. 

*

He wakes, suddenly, the maniacal laughter in his dream still echoing in his ears. He stays still, eyes open, trying to figure out what disturbed him. 

There’s a shadow near the window.

He blinks again, staring at it. The only light comes through the window, but the shape is somehow darker than the space around it, and suddenly he realizes that it’s a person. That someone is here in the room with him, and they’re watching him.

He springs into action, leaping out of his nest of blankets, racing towards the shadow. A foot gets caught in a blanket as he goes, and the split second it takes to shake his foot free is all it takes for the shadow to move out of the way.

No longer in the shadows, it’s clear who it is. 

Robin.

He stumbles a little, staring at her. He should attack anyway, but something within him is unwilling to. The R on her chest draws his eye, and he raises up, traces the shape on his own chest. It feels more like a memory than a fantasy, picturing that R on his chest.

“How?” he asks, the word cracked and broken. She shouldn’t be here. He hadn’t gone home last night, and he hadn’t been followed.

She gestures towards his hoodie. He remembers her hand grabbing his wrist, and realizes that she’s put a tracker on him. That she knew where he was the whole time.

She holds her hands out and up, showing that she’s not intending him harm. “I told Batman about you.”

He shakes his head, not wanting to hear what comes next. Images storm his mind of Batman, of laughter, of a tire iron, of a wheel leaning against a car that could only be the Bat’s…

“He didn’t believe me,” she continues. “That you are-- that you’re who I think you are. Said it was impossible. Said I was being tricked somehow.” She scoffs. “He’s afraid to hope, I think. Your… leaving, it broke him.”

He wraps his arms around himself. She’s a sturdily built girl, muscular, but he’s bigger, and there’s a maelstrom of emotion fueling him. He thinks he could take her, could escape, leave Gotham behind and wouldn’t have to deal with the shattered remains of a life that he doesn’t want to remember.

“The thing i don’t get is _how_ ,” she says, nose crinkling up. “I mean you… I saw the reports on what happened to you. It was pretty indisputable, but here you are.” Seeing his expression, she says, gently, “It wasn’t morbid or anything, Batman just… wanted me to know. He thinks we’re a lot alike, and he worries. You know how he gets when he worries.”

He shakes his head, denying. Denying that he knows Batman, that he is the person that Robin thinks. She’s wearing the uniform, there’s no space for him there. He’s not meant to exist in that life anymore. He _can’t._

She smiles at him, soft and sweet. “It’s okay, I didn’t even mean to bring it up. What happened. Not exactly something you’d talk about with a stranger. I just… I think that Batman needs to see you, and I think that you need to see him just as badly.” She holds out her hand towards him. “Come with me, Jason.”

Jason blinks, and it’s like a whirlpool of memories have opened up within him, all the things he’s been trying to escape trying to suck him down. He struggles, shoulders shaking as he tries to weather it, tries to avoid losing himself in the chaos.

His name is Jason Todd, and he was Robin, and if he reaches his hand out, if he takes this girl’s offer, then he could see Batman. He could see Bruce. He could take his life back.

He holds his hand out, slowly, shaking the whole way. She doesn’t rush him, just watches him with that soft sad look, like she knows what she’s giving up. Like she’s willing to give up her own dreams to give him back his, and she doesn’t even _know_ him. 

She’s Robin now, he can’t be, he shouldn’t take her hand…

But then she grabs his, smiling sharp-bright, and says, “We’re going to the Cave, Jason. Ready to see Batman speechless? I’m gonna hold this over his head for so freaking long, you have no idea. I love being right.”

She keeps chattering, tugging him along with her gently, like they’re friends. Like he’s someone she’s always known, like he’s a functional person. He goes with her, climbs on her motorcycle behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist as she takes off in the night, her hair tickling his nose.

That’s why Jason laughs, feeling suddenly light and free, despite the maelstrom inside.

Home is waiting.


End file.
